By JARON SCHNEIDER

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has released its TRUST test, a free online training program to certify that pilots understand the rules of drone flight. It is required in order to fly a drone, even recreationally. 

The Recreational UAS Safety Test, otherwise known as TRUST, applies to all pilots. Even those who just operate a drone “for fun or personal enjoyment” must take this test in order to legally fly in the United States. If a drone weighs more than 0.55 pounds, pilots must additionally register it through the FAA’s Drone Zone.

The test is designed to provide education and testing for recreational flyers on important safety and regulatory information. The FAA says that even pilots who fly drones recreationally under the Exception for Recreational Flyers — which includes drone flights for educational purposes — must pass the test before they can legally fly.

By I. Bonifacic

A team of researchers from Germany’s Fraunhofer FKIE institute has created a drone that can locate screaming humans. While it sounds like the stuff of dystopian fiction, it’s actually something they set out to create to make it easier for first responders to find survivors following a natural disaster.

“(Drones) can cover a larger area in a shorter period of time than rescuers or trained dogs on the ground,” Macarena Varela, one of the lead engineers on the project, told The Washington Post. “If there’s a collapsed building, it can alert and assist rescuers. It can go places they can’t fly to or get to themselves.”

To create their drone, the researchers first recorded themselves screaming, tapping and producing other sounds that someone in need of help might make. They then used those recordings to train an artificial intelligence algorithm and tweaked the software to filter out ambient sounds like the hum of the drone’s rotors. Outside of software and UAV, the rest of the system isn’t that complicated. The team used the type of microphones you might find on your smartphone, mainly because they wanted to keep the drone light and agile.